Reputation - A Cognitive View of Reputation

A Cognitive View of Reputation

Until very recently the cognitive nature of reputation was substantially ignored. This has caused a misunderstanding of the effective role of reputation in a number of real-life domains and related scientific fields. In the study of cooperation and social dilemmas, the role of reputation as a partner selection mechanism started to be appreciated in the early 1980s.

Working toward such a definition, reputation as a socially transmitted (meta-) belief (i.e., belief about belief) concerns properties of agents, namely their attitudes toward some socially desirable behaviour, be it cooperation, reciprocity, or norm-compliance. Reputation plays a crucial role in the evolution of these behaviours: reputation transmission allows socially desirable behaviour to spread. Rather than concentrating on the property only, the cognitive model of reputation accounts also for the transmissibility and therefore for the propagation of reputation.

To model this aspect, it is necessary to specify and understand a more refined classification of reputation.

A recommendation can be extremely precise; in the stock market, for example, an adviser, when discussing the reputation of a bond, can supplement his informed opinion with both historical series and current events. On the other hand, in informal settings, gossip, although vague, may contain precious hints both to facts ("I've been told this physician has shown questionable behavior") and to conflicts taking place at the information level (if a candidate for a role spreads defamatory about another candidate, who should you trust?).

Moreover, the expression "it is said that John Smith is a cheater" is intrinsically a reputation spreading act, because on the one hand it refers to a (possibly false) common opinion, and on the other the very act of saying "it is said" is self-assessing, since it provides at least one factual occasion when that something is said, exactly for the fact the person who says so (the gossiper), while appearing to spread the saying a bit further, may actually be in the phase of initiating it.

Gossip can also be used as an identifier only - as when gossiping about unreachable icons, like royalty or showbiz celebrities - useful only to show the gossiper belongs to the group of the informed ones. While most cases seem to share the characteristic of being primarily used to predict future behavior, they can have, for example, manipulative sub-goals, even more important than the forecast.

Considering, for example, the case of a communication between two parties, one (the advisee) that is requesting advice about the potential for danger in a financial transaction with another party (the potential partner, target), and the other (the adviser, evaluator) that is giving advice.

Roughly speaking, the advice could fall under one of the following three categories:

1. the adviser declares it believes the potential partner is (is not) good for the transaction in object;
2. the adviser declares it believes another (named or otherwise defined) agent or set of agents believes the potential partner is (is not) good for the transaction in object;
3. the adviser declares it believes in an undefined set of agents, hence there is a belief the potential partner is (is not) good for the transaction in object;

Note the care to maintain the possible levels of truth (the adviser declares - but could be lying - it believes - but could be wrong - etc..). The cases are listed, as it is evident, in decreasing order of responsibility. While one could feel most actual examples fall under the first case, the other two are not unnecessarily complicated nor actually infrequent. Indeed, most of the common gossip falls under the third category, and, except for electronic interaction, this is the most frequent form of referral. All examples concern the evaluation of a given object (target), a social agent (which may be either individual or supra-individual, and in the latter case, either a group or a collective), held by another social agent, the evaluator.

The examples above can be turned in more precise definitions using the concept of social evaluation defined above. At this point, we can propose to coin a new lexical item, image, whose character should be immediately evident from the following: